ChillinMargrave:Lovely review, I liked the puns and calculations. It did make me a bit wondering if I should buy it or not, I probably won't tho.

He pretty much covered it all. I liked it at the $5 price point and it's probably worth $10 if you really liked Diablo I & II but wished you could cut out the pretense of a story, add some shared storage for all of your characters, travel with a dog or a cat (instead of your friends) down into the giant hole under the town where you go spelunking for monsters to kill so you can sell all of their clothes and weapons that they drop and occasionally go fishing so you can turn your dog into a gremlin hippopotamus who can carry your stolen lewt back to the surface on a shopping trip.

Finally... a genre that works better with a controller than keyboard and mouse. They just need to learn to streamline the inventory system.

Yeah, that's my opinion as well, just check out Champions of Norrath for the PS2, a Diablo clone based on the EverQuest universe which plays wonderfully with the PS2 controller (and it avoids those horrible jumping puzzles from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel). In my opinion that's the best game the genre has produced so far.

For once I actually feel obligated to call Yahtzee out as being full of it.

As others have already said, it's mostly funny, but his whining about the controls and the dog selling stuff for you in town tell me two things:

Yahtzee is a console gamer that can't be trusted with anything but WASD, left click and right click on a PC; and

His claim that he spent upwards of 10 hours playing the game is false... Unless he couldn't be arsed to read the tutorials and didn't even try to click and hold his mouse cursor over an enemy.

Firstly, controls: Action RPGS and MMOs generally have interfaces designed for keyboards and mice. This means a hotbar activated with the number keys and even using those fabled function keys (that is, F1-F12) console-exclusive gamers have heard so much about. Also, you can click and hold your mouse button to keep attacking. I don't know what the hell he was doing but he was doing it wrong.

Secondly, the pet: Purely a convenience. In *other* ARPGs you have to go back to town every few minutes, identify your equipment (in the case of Diablo 1 & 2, not so in the case of Dungeon Siege 2) and flog it. Most ARPG players will be familiar with the eventual loot strategy of "leaving everything that isn't magical" to be as space and time efficient as possible. In Torchlight you can continue picking up everything. You just shift+click on white items to have your pet pick them up directly so you don't have to sort through them in your main inventory anyway. The only valid grievance I see here is the lack of an "auto identify" or "identify all" button.

*EDIT: Another random quibble -- Torchlight isn't just a Steam game. You can buy through at least two other download services as well as directly Runic or the publisher.

funny review overall, but I really wonder how Yahtzee always manages to have control issues, even in games that have the same controls as tons of games before them...sorry, but if you're having problems with the controls or don't know which key opens / closes the map etc it might be time to have a short look in the manual. Or, if you don't want to do that, try the usual keys for that in games, i.e. the tab key or just M.

Other than that, the review was pretty entertaining, although I think Yahtzee is running into a problem: He's made fun of most gaming cliches out there and it seems to be getting harder to say something new and funny about the ones he encounters now.

This game really makes me doubt your game skills or your ability to read. Several times I have seen the message "Hold down the button or key to ATTACK CONTINUOUSLY." I had the same issue with the flood of potions. I paid for a few and after a few hours I had a large pool full of the shit. And yes the friendly NPCs are unable to figure out the difficulties of following you and copying your turns.

One thing you didnt touch on was the claim that each time you play through the game, each level is randomized. This way when you play through the second time, you dont already know where everything is.

The alchemist is very easy to make over powered. I put no skills in the defense attribute, and load skill points into minions and knock back for the missles.

When I saw he was going to review Torchlight, I thought to myself "Aw man, he's totally gonna hate this game". Good to know I wasn't disappointed. I did notice some inconsistencies in his review, especially concerning having to click every time you attack. I can just hold down the left mouse button. I think I can finally say that Ben Croshaw is the Armond White of video games.

Have to disagree with Yahtzee on this one. For a small game that was born from the ashes of the Flagship Studio fiasco, they've done quite alright. It's a pretty good game for the $3 I spent on it, heck its better value than COD:MW2.

victorluft:To quibble in re: the three rooms/copy paste thing, *all* of the levels are randomly generated, so there is that. Also you can just hold down the mouse button instead of clicking until your fingers fall off if you prefer.

That's a fair point, but it then raises the question - "why the mouse button needs to be held down instead of just one click = auto attack?".

I mean, if the multi click was to try and add some intensity to the experience, it isn't working, and as for holding it down on the enemy? I can't think of any other times I've click and held a mouse *without* dragging it to move something from place to place (ie drag file to recycling bin or click&drag with the pen tool in photoshop).

Now I admit I've never played Diablo 2, but I've been using a mouse for nearly 20 years and probably 10 different GUI operating systems so I still say its a weird way to play a large part of the game.

The splash screen in the lower-right during the intro has a double-image of Yahtzee holding a controller and him sitting at his computer. This could be ironic if it was a multiplatform game but I think he just forgot to turn off the transparency for one of the layers.

This game sounds like Fate, which plays like NetHack, which was basically a distillation of other freeware Dungeon Crawler games. I was as addicted to Fate as I was to NetHack, and if I got this I'd probably play it to distraction while wondering why, when I have Dragon Age.

And as much as I loved Oblivion, you did have to click every time you wanted to hit an enemy. Same with Fallout 3, near as I remember. I stopped playing that once GFWL screwed me out of my DLC. Okay, with Fallout 3 there were guns, and you could hold down the button, but still.

Also, I am a female with very large breasts (DDD, if anyone knows what that means) and I was a fair archer.

muahahahaha i enjoyed this one, pretty fun and insightful, also quick john defoe reference eh?(oh yeah your doomsday arcade appearence was cool, just that i thought that they would give you some dialogue) ,anyway preetty awesome

Cpt_Oblivious:I'd have to disagree this week. Torchlight is a great game for killing time and relieving stress. You're pissed off, you want to kill lots of stuff, it lets you and makes you feel awesome for it. And as for "Clicking everywhere", Yahtzee fails to notice you can hold the mouse button down to continually move and attack.